Optical Phantasm Pictures: Beautiful Footage That Aren’t At All What They Appear

Is it a floating metropolis, a maze of pc circuitry …

Romain Jacquet-Lagreze

Or just a bloated condominium complicated at an uncommon angle? Seen straight up from a road-degree courtyard by photographer Romain Jacquet-Lagreze, this previous residential constructing on Hong Kong island turns into a canyon of glass and concrete, jagged with balconies and window-mounted AC models. Lose your self within the particulars—simply attempt to not lose your footing. These beautiful pictures stand the check of time.

No, that fuzzy bump on the leaf is not chest hair.

Conny Sandland/Malaysia

It is not a part of the leaf in any respect—it is simply making an attempt to look that method. Native to India and Southeast Asia, the widespread baron caterpillar is one in every of nature’s greatest-camouflauged vegetarians. A central yellow stripe and department-like spinal growths hold the baron invisible to birds and free to feed on mango leaves like this one. Look when you can: With camouflage this good, it is solely a matter of time earlier than the caterpillar grows right into a baron butterfly. Do you know these details about butterflies?

Should you thought a towering inferno, you are not far off.

Andrei Duman/Vault Archives

Within the morning mild, this wall of Utah’s Mule Canyon ripples and glows like flames above three squat Anasazi ruins, prompting guests to call the location Home on Hearth. Estimated to be greater than 800 years previous, these sandstone dwellings have recognized a campfire or two; peek inside, and you will see smoke stains on the roof.

Is it a golf ball, ripples in a pool, or …

Jan Vermeer/Minden Footage/AP Photograph

An enormous, chilly purpose to show your boat round? Like all icebergs, this dimpled slab of Antarctic ice—as soon as a bit of a glacier—is now unmoored and drifting like a frozen battleship. With as much as ninety % of an iceberg’s mass hidden underwater, it is best to steer clear. One of many largest ever reported was greater than 12,000 sq. miles—a cellular island bigger than Belgium. (Do you know Antarctica has no time zones? Listed here are another geography errors everybody makes.)

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No, that is not lava or oil spilling into the ocean …

Yann Arthus-Bertrand/AP Photograph

Although diving in would nonetheless be a scorching mistake. At 370 ft large, Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring is the most important scorching spring in America, piping almost 200-diploma water out of the earth on the clear blue middle and cooling it to about 131°F in these reddish-brown rivulets. The cooler the water, the higher the number of mild-reflecting micro organism that reside there, creating a shocking rainbow impact explorer Ferdinand Hayden referred to as “a privilege and a blessing” to behold.

Nope, it isn’t the roof of a temple…

Sam Kaplan

In his Pits and Pyramids collection, photographer Sam Kaplan turns treats into temples, as with this sugary shrine of greater than 1,300 cookies glued to foam-core platforms. “I feel prop stylist Michelle Longo and I purchased each field of Lorna Doones in a 20-block radius,” Kaplan says.

It isn’t a Mini-Wheat underneath a microscope…

Donald W. Raub

It is a big snowflake! Nicely, type of. When the floor temperature of an object drops under freezing, water vapor within the surrounding air clings to it in crystals. Simply as vapor bundles round frozen water droplets to type snowflakes, reader Donald W. Raub’s wire fence (seen right here) turned a frosty fresco on a chilly Pennsylvania morning. We guess you by no means knew these information about snow.

No, that is not a purple seashore, or chilly fruit punch…

Cherry Li

It is tonight’s essential course. Photographer Cherry Li snapped this shut-up of an icy fish fillet for a Beijing sushi bar that prides itself on utilizing high quality components—and within the sushi biz, that not often means “catch of the day.” To kill parasites and protect taste, a lot of the raw fish utilized in sushi have to be frozen at subzero temperatures for anyplace from 15 hours (the FDA’s really helpful minimal) to a number of years. Your style buds would by no means know the distinction—simply do not make these errors when you’re consuming sushi.